John Joseph of the Cross (literally)
[1654-1734]
The prolific writer Rev. Butler’s 1864 telling of the life of John Joseph of the Cross is awfully poetic: “When death came to pluck him from the tree,” he writes, “he dropped like a ripe fruit, smiling, into his hands.” So his description of such a sensitive saint’s self-imposed tortures come as all the more violent. At the age of 40, when John Joseph’s superior in the monastery told him he needed to start wearing sandals, the saint placed a handful of small nails on the soles them before he put them on. Later, he nailed a foot-long cross directly into his back, the wounds from which never healed.